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A sexy, riveting psychological thriller about a young man with an unknowable past who lands in a small town, seduces a man's wife and steals his beloved dog. Nat Banyon is young, handsome and slightly rough around the edges. Just outside of a town called Deepwater, he runs across a minor car crash. A fiftyish man named Finch has hit a red fox and has veered off the road. Banyon offers to help and gives Finch a ride home. On the way they get to talking and Finch, already more than a little perceptive about the straits Banyon might be in, offers him a job fixing things up around his motel. Banyon accepts and later that day he meets Iris, Finch's young wife. Banyon and Iris make eye contact and in no time flat, they begin a steamy affair. In the meantime, Banyon and Finch's relationship develops into a sort of father and son relationship on the one hand, and a deeply threatening one on the other. Banyon, an orphan, begins to have nightmarish fantasies that Finch may be his real father. As Banyon becomes more and more involved with Finch's life and the Deepwater locals, he finds himself understanding less about Finch. Is he the town father or town thug? Is he a benevolent man who wants to take care of Iris and Banyon, or is he setting them up for a fall? For fear that Finch will kill them, Iris wants Banyon to kill her husband. Then they can steal his stash and escape Deepwater together. Is Banyon capable of murder' What we think we know about Nat Banyon gets thrown into question as Banyon's character becomes more and more fractured and it becomes less and less certain who in Deepwater is truly dangerous. In the meantime, there's that damn dog to worry about. Deepwater has all one wants from a thriller: sex, violence and a dog. Matt Jones has created a caste of wonderfully complex characters and enough twists and turns to keep you flipping the pages until the very last one. Praise "Matthew F. Jones's Deepwater is one of the best novels to cross my desk this year. Full of darkness and rage and nightmares its premise evokes James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice. Brilliantly written, sweatily erotic, and unbearably suspenseful, Deepwater should go directly to the top of your reading list." — The Cleveland Plain Dealer "Deepwater is a harrowing and unsettling piece of fiction. It accomplishes the neat trick of fulfilling its literary aspirations without belying its affinity for genre fiction…it dissolves the boundaries between present and past, memory and prediction, doing and dreaming…inescapably chilling, it is the dark shadowy figure that lives on the other side of magical realism." — Austin Chronicle "It's a grim story, and one told exceedingly well…[Jones] creates tension with remarkable economy and intricacy in a sinister narrative that ultimately reveals itself as a powerful expression of loneliness, dangerous passions, and the quest for identity." — Publishers Weekly Jones and Daniel Woodrell are the leading contemporary authors of country noir, a subgenre whose roots trace back to James M. Cain's Post Always Rings Twice. Jones builds tension from two seemingly contradictory sources: the noirist's stock-in-trade, the disaster waiting to happen, and the crackling unpredictability that comes from the expert melding of genres: noir thriller crossed with psychological horror. — Booklist *Starred Review Jones turns boondocks noir into hallucinogenic horror as…the postman rings again in a malignant pastoral of steamy sex, Oedipal terror, and a few too many Faulknerian fever dreams. — Kirkus Reviews